Forget Baudrillard? Without doubt, Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important figures currently working in the area of sociology and cultural studies. But his writings infuriate as many people as they intoxicate. This collection provides a wide-ranging, measured assessment of Baudrillard’s work. The contributors examine Baudrillard’s relation to consumption, modernity, postmodernity, social theory, feminism, politics and culture. They attempt to steer a clear course between the hype which Baudrillard himself has done much to generate, and the solid value of his startling thoughts. Baudrillard’s ideas and style of expression provide a challenge to established academic ways of proceeding and thinking. The book explores this challenge and speculates on the reason for the extreme responses to Baudrillard’s work. The appeal of Baudrillard’s arguments is clearly discussed and his place in contemporary social theory is shrewdly assessed. Baudrillard emerges as a chameleon figure, but one who is obsessed with the central themes of style, hypocrisy, seduction, simulation and fatality. Although these themes abound in postmodern thought they are also evident in a certain strand of modernist thought—one which embraces the writings of Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Baudrillard’s protestation that he is not a postmodernist is taken seriously in this collection. The balanced and accessible style of the contributions and the fairness and rigour of the assessments make this book of pressing interest to students of sociology, philosophy and cultural studies. Chris Rojek is Senior Editor in Sociology at Routledge and Visiting Fellow at the University of Portsmouth. Bryan S.Turner is Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. Forget Baudrillard? Edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan S.Turner London and New York First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1993 Chris Rojek and Bryan S.Turner: selection and editorial matter; individual chapters: the contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Forget Baudrillard?/[edited by] Chris Rojek and Bryan S.Turner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Baudrillard, Jean. 2. Sociology—France—History. 3. Sociology—Methodology. 4. Postmodernism—Social aspects. I. Rojek, Chris. II. Turner, Bryan S. HM22.F8B382 1993 93–14835 301′.0944–dc20 CIP ISBN 0-203-41288-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-72112-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05988-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-05989-5 (pbk) ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom.’ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Proverbs of Hell ‘The book must break up so as to resemble the ever increasing number of extreme situations. It must break up to resemble the flashes of holograms. It must roll around itself like the snake on the mountains of the heavens. It must fade away as it is being read. It must laugh in its sleep. It must turn in its grave.’ Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories Contents Notes on contributors viii Introduction: regret Baudrillard? ix Chris Rojek and Bryan S.Turner 1 Baudrillard: history, hysteria and consumption 1 Roy Porter 2 The sweet scent of decomposition 22 Zygmunt Bauman 3 Europe/America: Baudrillard’s fatal comparison 47 Barry Smart 4 Baudrillard for sociologists 70 Bryan S.Turner 5 Baudrillard’s woman: the Eve of seduction 88 Sadie Plant 6 Baudrillard and politics 107 Chris Rojek 7 Social class in postmodernity: simulacrum or return of the real? 124 Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell 8 Cruising America 146 Bryan S.Turner Name index 162 Subject index 165 Contributors Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at the University of Leeds. Dean MacCannell is Professor of Applied Behavioural Science and Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Juliet Flower MacCannell is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine. Sadie Plant is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Roy Porter is Senior Lecturer in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, London. Chris Rojek is Senior Editor in Sociology at Routledge, London, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Portsmouth. Barry Smart is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland. Bryan S.Turner is Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. Introduction Regret Baudrillard? A recent review of one of Baudrillard’s most important books, Seduction, illustrates the difficulty of commenting upon his work. The review, written by one of the shrewdest analysts of Baudrillard’s œuvre,1 begins by conveying the right air of gravitas. Baudrillard is described as a ‘subtle’, ‘powerful’ thinker. His work is considered to be at the cutting edge of social and cultural theory. However, quite quickly the reviewer is also driven to observe that many of Baudrillard’s arguments are ‘ludicrous’; and that his manner of presentation is often ‘maladroit’. Yet the conclusion that one would predict from these serious criticisms is absent. We are not invited to reject Baudrillard. On the contrary he is presented as a figure of unique importance and his writing is recommended as required reading for anyone interested in current thought. ‘Unsatisfactory as it obviously is,’ writes Mike Gane (1992:184)—the reviewer in question—‘unclassifiable as it is, it nevertheless throws up disturbing questions which will be dismissed only with a bad conscience.’ Gane’s review illustrates why many academics find Baudrillard so perplexing. Elementary errors and wild arguments usually bring down the full weight of academic scorn. However, in Baudrillard’s case they only seem to add to his charm. This is the writer who, among other things, has claimed blithely that America is utopia; that the masses have disappeared; that symbolic exchange is the only reality; and that the proper role for women is the role of the temptress. Baudrillard, it seems, gets away with murder. The crabby response of the Academy is understandable. Much of academic life, like the world of theatre, is driven by resentment. Success and failure in academic careers are relatively public in terms of requests to appear on TV chat shows, to attend international conferences in desirable locations, or to have one’s latest publication x Forget Baudrillard? translated. There is also an important difference between France and Britain, in the sense that there is a very definite star-system among French academics. While Baudrillard might not be at the top of the French system, his rise to international fame has been quite spectacular. Here again, there is the irony of Baudrillard as an Event of Spectacle within the media scene of the Academy. Certainly Baudrillard must be offensive to those ‘sound’ academics who have not ventured outside the narrow confines of their specialism to speculate, without evidence, surveys, or confidence levels, on the meaning of Las Vegas or Reagan’s face. It is interesting in this respect to compare Baudrillard with another global superstar, Umberto Eco. As far as we can tell, there has been no attempt to compare Baudrillard and Eco (Gane 1991a:163). Both men have been fascinated by America, and particularly by the problem of reality/authenticity/hyperreality in American culture. Eco’s book Travels in Hyperreality (1987) was originally published with the title Faith in Fakes (1986), although many of the first chapters first appeared in articles in Italian in the 1970s. Baudrillard’s America (1988) first appeared in French as Amérique (1986). The parallels in time, titles and interests are striking. For Eco, American hyper- reality has inauthenticated reality, creating a society with an addiction for fakes: This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between the game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of ‘fullness’, of horror vacui. (Eco 1987:8) Eco, who is world famous as the author of The Name of the Rose, is perhaps a more respectable figure than Baudrillard, because Eco continues to write ‘serious scholarship’, for example in the field of medieval theories of signs. Baudrillard’s later work is increasingly cool. Of course, the crabbiness against Baudrillard is not confined to academics used to the conventions of scholarly publication. Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine is volcanically dismissive of Baudrillard’s work. He (1990) ridicules the accuracy of Baudrillard’s arguments on hyperreality, simulation and seduction. Hughes Introduction xi slightingly casts Baudrillard as an impressionable sensation-seeker, blind behind the astral wheel of mass culture. A casual reader may be forgiven for siding with Hughes. For Baudrillard’s prose is inflated with outlandish confidence. Sometimes this can have unfortunate consequences. Thus, on the eve of the Geneva talks convened to avoid the Gulf War, Baudrillard could be found in the pages of Libération predicting that the Gulf War was impossible. Baudrillard argued that all of the permutations of war had been rehearsed by pundits and analysts on television. Therefore the real war can never happen because the phoney war has already been fought by the communications industry. Baudrillard’s recklessness may be criticized for undermining his credibility.